Cuban freestyle gladiator Milaimy de la Caridad Marín, 76 kilograms (kg), will bid farewell to 2023 with much joy and the Olympic ticket to Paris 2024 thanks to her fifth place at the World Wrestling Championships in Belgrade, Serbia, last September.
Marín, Youth Olympic champion in Buenos Aires, Argentina, five years ago, and world champion in the youth and U23 categories, had another important moment at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile, where she won the title; while in the Central Caribbean event in San Salvador she won the bronze medal.
These results as a whole made her worthy of a special mention among the best athletes of Cuba this year, who were awarded this Tuesday at the coliseum of the Ciudad Deportiva.
In the universal competition, she won the fifth place in her weight class against the Romanian Catalina Axente, to guarantee her place in the five rings competition that will be held in the French capital.
Before that duel, the talented wrestler from the island was unable to win one of the bronze medals in the 76 kg weight class, losing 6-10 against American Adeline Gray, owner of six crowns in world events and the Olympic silver medal in Tokyo 2020.
Despite not reaching the awards podium, the Cuban completed a great performance in this tournament, in which she achieved four victories and suffered two setbacks.
In that tough competition, Marín had three victories and was only stopped in one of the semifinals by Japan’s Yuka Kagami, who beat her with a 5-2 score to advance to the dispute for the gold metal, which was ultimately won by the Japanese.
The Caribbean nation’s gladiator had debuted with a comfortable 10-0 success, by technical superiority, against Italy’s Enrica Rinaldi, and then in the round of 16 she had to push herself to the maximum to defeat Ecuador’s Genesis Rosangela Reasco 5-4; while in the round of the best eight she beat Ukraine’s Anastasiya Alpyeyeva 6-2.
Prior to her participation in the World Championship, the young wrestler finished third in the regional competition in San Salvador, where she lost in the semifinal to Colombian Tatiana Rentería.
Then came her revenge last November at the Pan American Games in Santiago de Chile, where Marín once again demonstrated her excellent level on the mat to beat Rentería, bronze medalist at the world tournament in Belgrade, 5-4 in the final.
With this gold medal, she was able to «get rid of the thorn» of what happened in El Salvador, besides repeating her reign of months ago in the Pan American Wrestling Championship.
Those results as a whole could guarantee her to be in the group of the 10 best Cuban athletes in 2023, and although it did not happen that way, the young athlete of the island has many reasons to celebrate what she achieved in the year that is about to say goodbye.
